A Google internship aspirant shares how to best prepare for the position. (Image composite: Stock + Samay Jain)

“Dear Google! Thank You For Not Offering me an Internship”, wrote Samay Jain, in a piece he put up on Medium on July 29, as a precursor to a fantastic internship experience. And that left many of readers wide-eyed – a Google Internship aspirant, who’s happy that he didn’t make it?

And then we got in touch and explored the whys behind his stint for an earnest try at Google, for an internship opportunity. This is an account of his experience preparing for that internship, all that happened on the proverbial D-Day and why he came down to his current statement.

Preparing for Google Internship:

I had researched a lot on how Google hires for their interns.

We asked Samay, to begin his thoughts, with how he first applied for the Google internship, ‘a dream opening for any Indian engineering student’ (his words, not ours). This is what he said:

“For the summer internships, the applications are out somewhere in October and all the selected students are finalised by December. So keep on checking Google’s careers page (https://careers.google.com/students/). The application process is simple, you just have to provide some basic details along with your resume and cover letter.”

And how did you prepare for it?

I had researched a lot on how Google hires for their interns. Through this research, I realised that to get an internship at Google or at any other big tech company it is very important to have good skills in data structures and algorithms. And being from the electronics branch I had very little idea about these two fields.

So, I started to slowly learn these two topics through free online courses. I would highly recommend ‘mycodeschool’ for data structures and MIT open courseware for algorithms. Along with this, I started to solve problems on Hackerrank and Hackerearth to get a good practice of algorithms. Apart from this, I was also attending a lot of meetups in order to meet some people who could help me with this.

And then, the rejection happened!

Samay was rejected in the first round, getting a no on the basis of his profile. He, however, believes that was a good turn!

“I learned a lot throughout this experience.”

Through his time spent in preparing for the elusive Google internship, Samay felt his skills improve exponentially.

“I understood what matters and what doesn’t matter.”

“I realized that it’s really really important to have a good profile that clearly signifies that you are truly passionate about the role you are applying for.”

He shared quick pointers for the students who are interested in a role as a software developer with tier 1 companies:

1. It is really important for students to get there hands dirty on some live projects. These projects can either be your individual projects or you can also help some startups in developing their product.

2. Contributing to an open source project is a huge plus point for your profile. For example, if you are a javascript developer start contributing in node modules.

3. Maintain your Linkedin, GitHub and StackOverflow profiles. It really helps in giving the recruiter an idea of your skills.

Life after the Google Internship Rejection!

Finally, the reason why Samay is grateful for the Round 1 rejection. Jain found this by listening to his mentor and opting for a startup internship, with a San Fransisco/Bangalore based startup – Observe.ai.

And we leave you with a thought – rejections define us in an even better way than our successes. If you have had any such defining experiences over your internship stories, let us know! Leave your thoughts in the comments or connect with us on editor@aspiringminds.in and we’ll get in touch with you!